so will this release be "the one" ? the one that makes everyone sit up and take notice? have a bunch of new stuff theyve been holding back?

well - if the past beta's have been any indication - with their little by little approach - it's not looking like it will be.

will all those extra screens in control panel - finally have 3d 360 degrees icons that spin? like the old demo video or is it just going to be as is - more clicks to do the same thing with no extra eye candy?

will the start menu list of items get icons back beside them for easy recognizablility? - or will it still be a spartan list of hard to decifer text - with a 3 second wait for icon in the sky to redraw while hovering?

will there be a new cheerful theme - that is blue and light hearted? will XP luna be included for those who feel depressed by the black over tones of an 80's stereo?

will there be many more video drivers - written by MS that support pixel shader (as the video companies dont seem to be doing a good job of this - especially if using an extra slot along side pcie/agp

"After this, Microsoft is changing the Product Keys, and will be checking in some User Experience code that they've been sitting on so they can still surprise the market. Jim talked about this during my interview, and I'll post more on that
later."

MSDS's only getting the public releases... no secret stuff to those smug Connect members

everything including the article jamie linked says MSDN and even some CPP memebers will be getting RC2..... so lets keep hoping... somce times it takes a while to get to MSDN....

thats assuming what you were trying to say is that I won't be seeing it on MSDN... which would be total BS if I don't....

<soapbox>
What aren't people who pay for the privalege of being MSDN members good enough to test ALL versions of Vista's betas if they want to? (ding ding shoulda just added all MSDN members to the Vista Beta and let them choose to participate if they wanted to)
</soapbox>

"After this, Microsoft is changing the Product Keys, and will be checking in some User Experience code that they've been sitting on so they can still surprise the market. Jim talked about this during my interview, and I'll post more on that
later."

This doesn't strike me as the wisest idea of all time. I mean the whole point of testing is to test the product as whole. If you are holding things back until the very end, your testing will surely suffer as a result.

judging from the "new way" ballmer seems to be viewing his cattle - er - i mean customers - my bet is the "real" aero - ie - something cool - will be an ultimate extra - so what we're seeing here is indeed the release - but the thing everyone wants will be
plaigued with Validation.

The suits probably decided that they cant have some funky cool UI - as businesses wouldnt like it - so theyve got it as a Plus style value add - that people must actively choose to load - and administrators can block

dahat wrote:﻿I’m jumping between 67k and 79k... so best case it’ll be down in ~10 hours... realistically... closer to 18 given previous experiences.

Oh I’d love to know who my bottleneck is.

Ouch that's bad. Have you tried selecting European site for download instead of United States? I'm getting about the same speed as Jamie here using the European download.

Wraaaaaag! Why didn't I ever think to do that before now.

Thanks for the suggestion. Now I've got ~400k/s coming down. At this rate I'll be able to install Vista on the tablet (32bit) while watching Battlestar Galactica tonight and on the desktop (64bit) not long later.

... if you'll excuse me... I need to go find something to hit my head against.

On second thought... I just upped the rate to ~740k/s after hopping into settings and the maximum concurrent transfers from 2 -> 4.